Wednesday evening settles over the chill, rich streets of Mayfair. Two fur-wrapped women are talking in Russian to a uniformed doorman, perhaps also Russian, outside a hotel. A man walks past speaking Hindi into his mobile. Next door, a few drinkers gather in the warm bar of the English Speaking Union. A modest glass or two of Fuller's London Pride – the man from the Guardian has white wine – and then we all troop upstairs to the panelled walls of the Churchill room, where rows of chairs have been laid out for the debate.

What would a stranger make of our small crowd? In our composition and politeness, we might be the annual general meeting of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society or the Friends of the Vole: mainly white, mainly male, mainly over 50, but not entirely so in any category. A wide range of social class: the leader of a new trade union, Workers of England, is here and so is Britain's former ambassador to Ethiopia, Sir Brian Barder, who sits behind me in a kilt. A glamorous young woman in pink cuts a striking figure, perfect in her makeup and dress. Why do we seem to know her? She turns out to be the BBC newsreader Louisa Preston, who in the London area is the first face you see after Huw Edwards speaks the sentence, "And now it's time for the news where you are". Tonight she's chairing the meeting, which has been organised by the Campaign for an English Parliament. The motion before us is that "This house believes that an English parliament is the last hope for a United Kingdom".

The problem (and I'm with the mood of the meeting, that sooner or later it will be a problem) is that the UK is neither a unitary nor a federal state. Devolution of power to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly has placed it somewhere in between. Other countries such as Spain and Italy have "asymmetric federations", in which some regions or nations – Sicily, Catalonia – have more autonomy than others, but each of their divisions has a democratic government to itself. England, on the other hand, is a nation with a government devoted to the UK rather than its own narrower interests. The kingdom is unequally enfranchised and England has what pre-devolutionary Scotland used to know as "a democratic deficit". The West Lothian question, the Barnett formula, "asymmetric federation": these phrases sailed as expected across the Churchill room on Wednesday, but underneath the constitutional abstractions ran the more gnashing discontent of "Why is nobody asking us if we want to go on paying for their free false teeth?"

Scilla Cullen, who chairs the Campaign for an English Parliament, sees a consequence in student behaviour: riots on the streets of London at the prospect of £9,000 fees and a contrasting hush in Edinburgh, where (for the moment) Scottish students get in for free. The same thing with public spending cuts, which (again, for the moment) are lower in Scotland than the south. All this could change later next year, but before then the Scot Nats need to win an election. Nonetheless, according to Ms Cullen, "there is [the] asset stripping of England". Supposing this is true – and Alex Salmond would certainly throw North Sea oil revenues into the balance – the question remains: does anyone care? Not many, to judge by this small audience or by the absence of recognisable names among the people who spoke. Eddie Bone, who handles the campaign's public relations, says that he exchanged 2,200 emails with all the MPs and peers at Westminster and could tempt none of them to speak up for the idea of an English parliament.

In their absence, Bone opposed his campaign's motion by reading out quotes from British politicians in an ironic and possibly selective way. England didn't need its own parliament because ... "the English are potentially very aggressive" (Jack Straw); "there's no such nationality as English" (John Prescott); "I believe in the United Kingdom head, heart and soul ... I've never even opened the Barnett formula" (David Cameron). A few in the audience laughed and tut-tutted. My own eyebrows were raised when Bone's co-speaker, a university teacher, said that "we seem to be giving up English culture to be part of the fourth German Reich", though his main point was that, watch out, China was reshaping the world and we had more to worry about than revising English governance.

Questions were invited. Sir Brian, the kilted former ambassador, stood up to say that "contrary to appearances" he was by descent predominantly English with some Polish Jewish thrown in. He was, I suspect, one of the few people in the room who, like Cameron, passionately believes in the UK – and, unlike Cameron, thinks that a properly federal system is the only way to save it. He must have been to quite a few similar occasions, because he was pleased to say that "apart from a little touch of anti-Germanism" (the fourth Reich remark) this one hadn't been "rancidly anti-Scottish and anti-European".

Next to boundless apathy, this may be the campaign's biggest obstacle. An English parliament, as Scilla Cullen said, would "give expression to English identity". But "English" is not somehow a small sentimental word like "Scots" or "Welsh". Many English people, especially in the liberal middle class, avoid it as a self-description, tying themselves to London, Gujarat, Yorkshire or an Irish granny instead. Labels and their significance are of course always changing – English nationalists will point to the rising popularity of the St George's flag – but the fact is that "British" still seems to offer a looser and more civic identity, not based on blood and soil, despite the British Empire and the party that calls itself British Nationalist.

"English nationalism": how attractive does that sound? Which is why the English Nationalist party, founded by a man who addressed St George's Day rallies in Beefeater costume, was relaunched as the English Democrats in 2002. The English Democrats are the political wing of the Campaign for an English parliament and their slogan is "Not left, not right, just English". In the last general election they fielded 107 candidates and won 0.3% of the English vote. Their most prominent success to date is the mayor of Doncaster. In conversation, they are anxious to stress their antipathy towards racism and their conviction that the British media, especially the BBC, conspire against them as a political movement and against the English identity they seek to express.

It seems ludicrous. Britain now has the most English – southern English – government in living memory. A Lab-LibDem coalition – Cowdenbeath governing Henley – would have given them much more to shout about. But in terms of democratic inequality the English complaint is substantial. Life under the present arrangements will muddle along for a while, but not for ever. What, after all, would a public meeting of Scottish nationalists have looked like in 1955? Like a few dozen white men sitting in a room, obscure to the newspapers, working up what many people would have thought of as an imaginary grievance.